Overthinking It on the Captain America movie and racism

(firstworldproblem: 140 characters isn’t enough so I have to do a blog post instead of twitter…)

Mark Lee on Overthinking It has a great post on a missed opportunity in the new Captain America movie wrt addressing racial problems in the US:

In other words, the struggle for racial equality isn’t the seedy underbelly of American identity. It practically defines it. And this is why I see the lack of any acknowledgement of racial tension in the Captain America movie as a real lost opportunity. As our idealized symbol of righteous American power, Captain America should obviously embody all of the great things about the American spirit, but he shouldn’t pretend that the terrible things about the American spirit don’t exist or ignore their destructive power. In fact, if he’s the Great American Hero we so desperately want him to be, then he should be confronting these issues head on.